[FRC Blog] Orlando Incident

[PayneTrain]

Blog Date: Wednesday, April 16, 2014 - 11:26

At the Orlando Regional, the number one ranked alliance was retroactively disqualified for two matches because of a failure to be re-inspected after a modification had been made to one of their robots, the robot of Team 1902, Exploding Bacon. I received a phone call from the field on this incident before the disqualification was announced, and supported the recommendation of the disqualification based on the information I had available at the time.

I received detailed reports from volunteers at the event within a few days after the incident, reinforcing my understanding that the team had not been re-inspected after the modification. Recognizing this differed from the team’s account as reported on the forums, I decided to not address this issue publicly, over concerns of causing additional friction between the volunteers and the teams.

However, because of additional information I received and after more consideration, I decided to look more closely at this incident. I recently reached out to both the team and the volunteers for additional reports. Unlike the additional information I received in the recent Team 1323 incident, the additional information I received in this situation did not let me resolve the discrepancies in reports. I am not able to construct a coherent narrative based on the information I have, and I won’t be reversing the ruling that was made at the event. I don’t believe anyone supplying information is being disingenuous –human memories are imperfect, and it’s easy to misremember exact sequences of events or precisely who said what, especially days or even weeks after the event itself. FIRST is a Character driven organization, and my working assumption, unless unambiguously demonstrated otherwise, is that everyone who participates is reporting information accurately as they remember it.

From the recent information I received, however, I was able to get a better sense for the damage caused to the reputations of Team 1902 and their alliance partners, Teams 233, The Pink Team, and 624, CRyptonite. I understand now that a report of this issue even reached at least one of the local papers. Whatever the actual sequence of events was, I am absolutely convinced that neither 1902, nor their alliance partners, intended to skirt the rules in this situation or believed that anything they were doing was wrong.

I apologize to Teams 1902, 233, and 624 for any tarnish this has put on their reputations. I believe this is not deserved. I also apologize for my lack of immediate action on this issue.

Lastly, FIRST wants to improve from this experience, so we are putting guidelines in place with the Inspectors to ensure re-inspections required because of robot modifications are fully documented, to help prevent an issue like this from occurring again.

I apologize again to the teams and the community, for this incident.

Frank

Well, there you go.

[Ernst]

So this basically means that we'll be filling out a form every time we make a change to the robot? That isn't too big of a deal.

Now if only we could get our programmers to do that

[JohnFogarty]

This is what I expected to occur in this instance. Still unfortunate that it occured but i'm sure all the Orlando teams appreciate the transparency.

[Jon Stratis]

It will be interesting to see how we're going to be tracking reinspections. As I'm sure everyone can agree, teams make changes or repairs at competition all the time - the work seems to never stop, and just walking around the pits for 5 minutes shows me at least a dozen teams who are doing something that needs reinspection - and an hour later, it'll be a different dozen! This poses some interesting paperwork issues, in that we'll possibly be generating a lot of additional paper to keep track of it!

I know at my regionals, I have inspectors stationed at 3 spots Friday and Saturday - in the queueing line, at the field, and at the inspection station. This means teams can get reinspected when they ask, AND that every team gets a small reinspection before every match AND that every team that breaks on the field has an inspector following them back to their pit to ensure the repair or replacement is reinspected immediately (often because the inspector is helping the team do the repair or figure out what to do!). If we have to keep track of paperwork for all of these reinspections at a regional... yikes! I certainly hope that FIRST can come up with a wireless, computerized solution for us (something like the NI Parkway app so inspectors can document reinspections quickly right from their smartphone or tablet!).

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

It will be interesting to see how we're going to be tracking reinspections. As I'm sure everyone can agree, teams make changes or repairs at competition all the time - the work seems to never stop, and just walking around the pits for 5 minutes shows me at least a dozen teams who are doing something that needs reinspection - and an hour later, it'll be a different dozen! This poses some interesting paperwork issues, in that we'll possibly be generating a lot of additional paper to keep track of it!

I know at my regionals, I have inspectors stationed at 3 spots Friday and Saturday - in the queueing line, at the field, and at the inspection station. This means teams can get reinspected when they ask, AND that every team gets a small reinspection before every match AND that every team that breaks on the field has an inspector following them back to their pit to ensure the repair or replacement is reinspected immediately (often because the inspector is helping the team do the repair or figure out what to do!). If we have to keep track of paperwork for all of these reinspections at a regional... yikes! I certainly hope that FIRST can come up with a wireless, computerized solution for us (something like the NI Parkway app so inspectors can document reinspections quickly right from their smartphone or tablet!).

I like this approach. I know at one of our events this year I had to wander around for 20 minutes trying to find an inspector to reinspect us after we added a GoPro to our bot (we had plenty of weight but given that the LRI at the event had ALREADY cursed at us for asking a question I wasn't taking chances). 30 minutes later one came by and okayed it.

So, I think I might push to have this practice implemented in NE. Thanks

[JeremyLansing]

I for one am definitely looking forward to an improvement in the reinspection process. Given the meticulous nature of initial inspections, it always seemed strange to me that reinspections could be a cursory once-over by an inspector. I would love a bit more thoroughness, even if it means reinspections take a little longer. Hopefully what happened at Orlando won't happen again.

[Ben Martin]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

I certainly hope that FIRST can come up with a wireless, computerized solution for us (something like the NI Parkway app so inspectors can document reinspections quickly right from their smartphone or tablet!).

Funny that you should mention this--the inspectors at Springside-Chestnut Hill and MAR Champs were using tablets with some sort of inspection app. We weren't given any forms to sign, just a sticker when we were done. There were a bunch of features, including a nice diagram of all the teams on a pit map and where they stood in the inspection process.

Maybe they were piloting something? Really not sure.

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by Ben Martin

Funny that you should mention this--the inspectors at Springside-Chestnut Hill and MAR Champs were using tablets with some sort of inspection app. We weren't given any forms to sign, just a sticker when we were done. There were a bunch of features, including a nice diagram of all the teams on a pit map and where they stood in the inspection process.

Maybe they were piloting something? Really not sure.

I heard there was a pilot of a new event management app in MAR... you never know if pilots will be successful and adopted, or fail and be set aside though - I certainly hope it was successful!

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

I heard there was a pilot of a new event management app in MAR... you never know if pilots will be successful and adopted, or fail and be set aside though - I certainly hope it was successful!

This is correct...I heard the overall response was pretty positive. It was used for everything from judging to inspecting to the game announcer reading off names.

[Orion.DeYoe]

To be completely honest I think the way FIRST (and Frank) handled this problem is unbelievable.
First of all, the "reinspection process" is NOT well-defined in the manual and as such a team has no way of knowing the magnitude of change that requires reinspection (do we need to get an inspector every time we change tread on the wheels?). Team's should not be made to suffer for FIRST's inability and refusal to define many rules properly. A team would have to be obviously and purposefully cheating before I would advocate a ruling like this.
Second of all, the media got involved. Every one of us here in the 21st century should know the kind of damage that the media can do to an organization/individual's reputation. We should also be aware that a ruined reputation for a robotics team will interfere with it's ability to gain and retain sponsors as well as their ability to inspire further generations to become involved with STEM (which, may I remind you, is FIRST's entire mission).
I think that the way FIRST handled the repercussions of this decision were very inadequate. FIRST needs to write a press release to defend the reputation of these teams as well as writing each of their sponsors to explain the situation. It is FIRST's responsibility to make sure that the damage to a few teams' reputation doesn't cause these teams permanent harm as well a to prevent the bad reputation to spread to other teams and the organization as a whole.

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by Orion.DeYoe

Second of all, the media got involved. Every one of us here in the 21st century should know the kind of damage that the media can do to an organization/individual's reputation. We should also be aware that a ruined reputation for a robotics team will interfere with it's ability to gain and retain sponsors as well as their ability to inspire further generations to become involved with STEM (which, may I remind you, is FIRST's entire mission)
I think that the way FIRST handld the repercussions of this decision were very inadequate. FIRST needs to write a press release to defend the reputation of these teams as well as writing each of their sponsors to explain the situation. It is FIRST's responsibility to make sure that the damage to a few teams' reputation doesn't cause these teams permanent harm as well a to prevent the bad reputation to spread to other teams and the organization as a whole.

Media getting involved is nothing FIRST is liable for...heck, I didn't even know about it until the blog post, FIRST probably didn't know about it until recently, so its not like it was a CNN headline

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Steven Donow

Media getting involved is nothing FIRST is liable for...heck, I didn't even know about it until the blog post, FIRST probably didn't know about it until recently, so its not like it was a CNN headline

I don't think us as outside observers can really adequately judge how local team reputation is affected by local media. Of course you hadn't heard of it, you live in Boston. All it takes is one misunderstood Google search and perhaps a sponsor would look elsewhere for a team to support.

[Abhishek R]

Originally Posted by Steven Donow

Media getting involved is nothing FIRST is liable for...heck, I didn't even know about it until the blog post, FIRST probably didn't know about it until recently, so its not like it was a CNN headline

It was a local media organization, so you would not have heard of it. Does that mean it's OK, just because it wasn't a large headline across FIRST? The image painted of 233 was very negative. I saw a slideshow that had photos of Pink's members doing various things at the competition from repairs in the pit to playing matches with the caption at the bottom of every slide along the lines of "The team was disqualified from the competition for not following the rules." Just because you didn't know about it does not mean no one was affected.

EDIT: I was typing this as Chris made his post. Exactly my point.

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by Abhishek R

It was a local media organization, so you would not have heard of it. Does that mean it's OK, just because it wasn't a large headline across FIRST? The image painted of 233 was very negative. I saw a slideshow that had photos of Pink's members doing various things at the competition from repairs in the pit to playing matches with the caption at the bottom of every slide along the lines of "The team was disqualified from the competition for not following the rules." Just because you didn't know about it does not mean no one was affected.

EDIT: I was typing this as Chris made his post. Exactly my point.

I wasn't saying this as a criticism towards the general complaint/idea of how this came across in the media; I was saying it in response to the post I quoted which came across as blaming FIRST for the media response.

[RunawayEngineer]

Originally Posted by Abhishek R

It was a local media organization, so you would not have heard of it. Does that mean it's OK, just because it wasn't a large headline across FIRST? The image painted of 233 was very negative. I saw a slideshow that had photos of Pink's members doing various things at the competition from repairs in the pit to playing matches with the caption at the bottom of every slide along the lines of "The team was disqualified from the competition for not following the rules." Just because you didn't know about it does not mean no one was affected.

EDIT: I was typing this as Chris made his post. Exactly my point.

Do you know where that slideshow is? I was only able to find a Florida Today Article about the regional, which is remains positive towards the Pink Team.

Apparently Florida Today follows the Pink Team on occasion. They've done a good job of reaching out to the media - back in 2007 when I was on the team, the only reporter we could get to talk to us was a freelance writer who was related to one of our members.

Some quick Google searches didn't show anything else that mentioned the incident on the first page, so I don't think that this will be a permanent stain for any of the teams.